CBA was born out of the tightening credit industry and the community-based financial services fields’ response to help their customers build assets and move into the financial mainstream. Over the past year, CBA has developed an innovative business model in coordination with community lenders and the major credit bureaus – and a package of products and services that bridges the needs and demands of the two industries for reliable, high quality data on unbanked and underbanked families. CBA is now a one-stop shop to aggregate data from hundreds of small lenders to furnish it to the major credit bureaus.

With seed funding from the Center for Financial Services Innovation, CBA was created through an allied partnership of industry leaders - Central Vermont Community Action, RUPRI Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, and AEO..

CBA has a mission to create huge impacts in the credit and asset building field. It also has a goal of ultimately affecting the way policies and regulations are developed in regard to credit scoring. Conventional banks are pressuring credit bureaus to identify new data and models to score the 30-50 million people in this country estimated as FICO “unscoreable”. CBA is creating recognition among credit bureau executives of the wealth of data that community-based financial educators measure - data with potential to predict credit risk. If credit scores continue to be such a key element to the evaluation of creditworthiness in the eyes of conventional financial institutions, then finding such a means for leveling the playing field, and giving all borrowers, regardless of income and asset status, access is essential to the financial independence of millions of Americans.